After years of campaigning, an August election that cut the race down to two, and an increasingly nasty runoff, Megan Barry was the last one standing Thursday night — and it wasn't even close.
A week after the release of a poll declaring the race a statistical tie, Barry won by an easy 10 points, besting David Fox by more than 10,000 votes. When she is sworn in on Sept. 25, she will become the first woman to hold the mayor's office in Nashville history.
That outcome was clear the moment the early vote tally was released at 7:40 p.m. — behind schedule because of a court order to keep the polls open late at one East Nashville precinct that opened late yesterday morning — showing Barry with a 5,000-vote lead. The gap only grew as the night went on, thrilling a packed house of Barry supporters at the Nashville Farmer's Market who roared louder each time an updated count was announced.
Once her opponent finished his concession speech, which drew cheers and jeers from a group of supporters watching on a TV toward the back of the crowd, Barry took the stage just after 9 p.m. With a large group of newly elected and re-elected Metro Council members behind her, as well as state legislators and other supporters, Barry confirmed to the crowd that had just finished chanting her name that it was over.
“I just received a very nice phone call from David Fox, and David called to say congratulations," she said. "He said he looks forward to working together and moving forward with Nashville, and that’s who we are and that’s what we’ll do.”
This night, her election, represented the beginning of a "new chapter for Nashville" for entrepreneurs, teachers, and working families, she said. How new this chapter really is from the one we've been reading for the past eight years remains to be seen. Barry's tenure on the council was spent in complete alignment with the man she'll replace, Karl Dean. And speculation turns now to whether her administration will feature any holdovers from his. Dean's finance director, Rich Riebeling, was at the Barry party Thursday night. Asked what this meant for him, he said it was "too soon" to tell, but that this night was about Barry.
Indeed it was. And the crowd never cheered louder than when Barry laid out the detail about this "chapter" that guarantees her administration will be a notable one.
“And then there’s the chapter that we’re writing today," she's said. "You, the Nashville voters. This one is going to go down in the history books. This one is all about the fact that today you went to the polls, and you elected the first woman mayor.”
She thanked her campaign staff, her volunteers; supporters like Phil Bredesen, the former Nashville mayor and Tennessee governor who endorsed her; and former mayoral rivals Charles Robert Bone and Howard Gentry, who supported her in the runoff. But first she thanked her husband, longtime Scene contributor Bruce Barry, who she said had been "a saint and bitten his tongue a lot" through a campaign into which he and his past writing were eventually dragged.
“Tomorrow our real work begins," Barry said in closing. "But this is a job I hope I’ve been preparing for for the last eight years because I get to walk into that office and I actually know how it works. But I can’t do this without you. I cannot do this without all of you. So here is my ask. In the weeks, the months, and the years to come we all have to work together. We all have to lift up Nashville. We all have to be in this same place, rowing in the same direction, because that is how we will continue to make Nashville a great place for everyone. And Nashvillians, I believe in you. Thank you.”
She left the stage to Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered," and a raucous crowd quite a bit different from the one not far down the road.
Unlike last month, when partygoers wept openly at the loss of then-mayoral hopeful and presumed frontrunner Bill Freeman, there were few tears shed at Nelson’s Greenbrier Distillery when it became evident that David Fox would lose the election. For much of the night, people stood around wooden barrels restless and hoping that Barry’s early lead was just that — something early.
Many stood far from the TV screens blaring the News Channel 5+ analysis about a growing gulf between the two camps until Fox took the stage a little over an hour after the polls closed.
“We will do anything we can to be helpful; if there’s anything we can to be useful, call on us, and we’ll certainly not hesitate to help Megan be as successful a mayor as we’ve ever had,” Fox said in his concession speech, urging the crowd to do everything it can to support Barry.
Fox said he has no regrets about what he called a “very aggressive campaign.” To reporters, he added he wouldn’t take anything back from the last month.
“There’s nothing about our campaign that I would do differently. It would be interesting to do some analysis of the vote to see if there’s something to determine because we were surprised. We thought it’d be a very close election and instead it’s a pretty substantial margin,” Fox said.
But while he said he was proud of his campaign, he said he called Barry before giving his speech and said he was sorry for the nastiness of the last month.
“I told her I was sorry that this past month has been such a negative affair," Fox said, "but I’m confident that we can all get through it."
